Trains of Recollection / Drawn from Fifty Years of Railway Service in Scotland and Canada, and told to Arthur Hawkes

by D. B. Hanna

McWhilt was sent for and voted for Gould, the Liberal.

When Shaw, senior, heard the news he was too astounded to say more than “I’ll make him pay that note to-morrow.”

One snowy night the engineer of a train between Merrickville and Smith’s Falls thought he bumped something at a crossing; but saw nothing to make him stop the train. Arrived at Smith’s Falls he looked around for signs of an accident, and found them. On the cowcatcher was the box of a bobsleigh, with McWhilt fast asleep in it, so much repose may conviviality induce.

At eighteen years of age, with the profession of civil engineer as his objective, George Shaw was appointed to a party that was to survey Indian reserves in Rupert’s Land. Chicago and St. Paul furnished the way in; and the steamer International down the Red, from several miles north of Grand Forks, completed the last stage to Winnipeg.

Shaw was one of a small proportion of first-class passengers. The berth was of child-like dimensions. For washroom in the morning he was directed to the bow, where stood a bowl, stool, with a bucket and rope alongside. The passenger let down his bucket into the river, drew all the turbid water his fastidiousness could use, and made the best of a towel which had once been laundered.

It was a fitting prelude to a Western career which was to have a great traffic-bearing intimacy with the whole of the empty sub-continent which the boy surveyor was to see—an era of transformation unexampled in Britannic history.

The time was eight years after Riel was the President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land, with a Council and Cabinet, and the future Lord Strathcona had helped a Convention to draw up a Bill of Rights for a Government which was heralded by the Fort Garry paper, the New Nation, with an editorial as redolent of revolution as anything that these latter times have produced. As a curiosity in Western political literature it is worth giving:

“The confirmation of Louis Riel as President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land by the Convention was announced mid salvos of artillery from the Fort and cheers from the delegates. The town welcomed the announcement by a grand display of fireworks, and the general and continued discharge of small arms. The firing and cheering were prolonged into the night, every one joining in the general enthusiasm, as the result of the amicable union of all parties on one common platform. A general amnesty to political prisoners will shortly be proclaimed, and the soldiers remanded to their homes to await orders, and everything will be placed on a peace footing. Vive la Republique!”

This phase of the second republic set up in Manitoba within two years was not as remote in men’s memories when Shaw reached Winnipeg as the opening of the Great War is in ours. It was part of a situation in which the Indian was still an uncertain, indeed a threatening ingredient. The surveying of the Indian reserves, hundreds of miles northwest of the Red River, where the posts of a few fur traders had afforded the only semblance of modern law and government, until the arrival of Governor Laird at Battleford, in 1876 to inhabit the quarters built by Hugh Sutherland, was the first long step toward the agriculture which has made Saskatchewan the greatest wheat growing province of the British empire. One of the Saskatchewan farmer organizations owns and operates about three hundred and fifty elevators at as many shipping points, and has increased the capacity of its own elevator at Port Arthur—eight hundred miles from the centre of the province—to seven and a half million bushels, and has acquired the old Canadian Northern elevator, with a capacity of seven million bushels more.

Shaw went to Battleford, the infant capital of the North West Territories, with the party that was in charge of George Simpson. It travelled by Red River train of tireless carts. The surveyors and their camping entourage walked beside their vehicles the whole of the six hundred and fifty miles to Battleford. The route was via Portage la Prairie, Fort Ellice, where the Qu’Appelle joins the Assiniboine; the Touchwood Hills, Humboldt (where a Canadian Northern division point was established within twenty-five years), and Batoche, where the South Saskatchewan was passed at Gabriel Dumont’s Crossing.